According to researchers
What people assume about you based on your looks alone
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Is seeing the same as believing? According to researchers: yes. One study found that visual information plays a major role in assessing competency and performance.
Whether in professional life, in private life or in politics – we humans quickly draw conclusions about the personality traits of others just by looking at them. Especially when we don’t know someone, certain characteristics emerge that we think we recognize and quickly pigeonhole.
Visual cues on the job
In a paper titled “Blinded by Our Sight,” researchers Nuria Tolsá-Caballero and Chia-Jung Tsay discussed how quickly we draw conclusions about the personality traits of others based on our gaze.
One of the properties that we are most likely to get a picture of is the following: competence. Especially when it comes to the election of leaders or political elections, the competence of others is assessed on the basis of visual information. This also explains why employers still prefer applications with a photo. They can then use these to roughly identify facial features, demographic characteristics and clothing and subconsciously get an idea of the applicant’s competence. According to the study, such impressions form within around 100 milliseconds after viewing. Furthermore, the perception of competence through appearance is said to have a tremendous impact on who is selected for positions of status and power, and even how CEO salaries are set.
The Influence of Appearance in Politics
According to the two researchers, visual assessments can also influence voting decisions. Appearance of competency may have more impact in the absence of other meaningful information, because we primarily use first impressions to judge people we don’t know. The researchers found that voters with less political knowledge appear to be influenced by visual cues on candidate photos in general elections, while voters with more political knowledge tend to be unaffected by visual cues. In primaries, on the other hand, they found that high-knowledge voters may know little about the candidates themselves and may be guided by visual cues. They even found that visual cues can affect impression formation so much that voters disregard or ignore relevant information.
How reliable are visual cues?
As the two researchers found out, actual competency is not related to facial features or clothing. Also, appearance says nothing about effectiveness as a leader or performance as a CEO. Research on static visual cues shows that judgments of competence are embedded in stereotypes about demographics and perceptions of status. This explains why we are so quick to make judgments, even before we have had a serious conversation with a stranger or observed their behavior: Because we are guided by stereotypes that are deeply embedded in us.
But what can we do about it? Probably the best way is us free from our prejudicesby getting to know the people we intend to judge as a whole – that is, personally first and foremost – while freeing ourselves from our overzealous, objective perceptions.
Source used: sciencedirect.com